PartnerStack Review: Launch, Grow, & Scale Effective Affiliate Program

This PartnerStack review will help you explore a channel you didn’t think about yet: recruiting and managing partners (or affiliates) to grow and scale your business.

Chances are that you are doing everything in the book to grow your business with inbound marketing tactics including blogging, social media, and growing your email list.

Maybe you are also working hard to launch automated webinars or regular webinars.

Or go all guns blazing with Guest blogging or link building efforts, staying busy on social media, producing infographics, creating slide decks for Slideshare, and more.

Heck, on top of all that, you might also be running paid advertising campaigns on various channels available today including Facebook ads, Google Ads, Quora Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Twitter ads.

If you aren’t doing any of those, you should. If you checked out all the boxes, then it’s time to think big.

It’s time to create, launch, grow, and scale up your partner program or even a simple referral program.

I’ve already written on Affiliate Marketing: The 6.82 Billion Proof For Growing Your Business (& Only Pay For Results) as to how affiliate marketing helps you grow, multiply, and scale up your efforts to get you the kind of results you never thought you’d get.

As Amanda Nielsen of New Breed writes,

“You might want to begin with low-barrier methods like a simple referral program for a flat-rate revenue share and slowly work your way into a co-sell program.”

How do you launch a partner program, referral program, or an affiliate program without breaking the bank?

You’d use PartnerStack, that’s what.

PartnerStack is an automated partner marketing platform. It’s a tool that allows you to create a multi-channel partner program and manage your partners, referrers, affiliates, or advocates.

PartnerStack provides you with an abundance of success tools to help you set up your partners for their success.

PartnerStack helps you with partner onboarding processes, providing marketing assets to partners or affiliates, communicating with your partners, and working with each of your partners at scale to make your partner program work for your business.

PartnerStack is built to help you build and scale up your affiliate programs, starting from day one — no set up, no coding, no heavy-weight work needed.

Partnerstack provides you with tools, infrastructure, and technology. With Partnerstack, you can:

• Launch out-of-the-box affiliate programs or partnership programs for your business.
• Integrate with the technology stack you are already using  (and you can customize your program to create both simple and complex partner channels, as you need to)
• Use a centralized dashboard to stay on top of your advocates, affiliates, ambassadors, resellers, referral partnerships, and more.
• Automate & manage partner management or affiliates management across channels. This includes asset management, automated emails, communication with affiliates, and more.
• Pay PartnerStack and they’ll manage partner payouts and global compliance for you.
• Provide access to marketing tools, referral program documents, sales success information, documents, and more to enable your affiliates or partners to succeed.
• Get in-depth analytics of all the campaigns that send you traffic, leads, and sales (thanks to the collective efforts of each of your partners or affiliates).

Create Customized Referral programs

With PartnerStack, you get everything you need to get your partners going right of the bat.

For instance, you can equip each new partner or affiliate with a unique and custom URL.

You can also have your partners direct where the traffic should go, and then track their individual performance.

As a brand, you can develop custom company pages by putting your brand at the forefront of your partner program.

This includes the ability to upload your logo, design your custom program sign-up page, choose your brand colors, and inviting your partners.

Grow Across Multiple Channels

Close more deals, generate more leads or bring traffic to your next campaign,

PartnerStack is built to handle every kind of partnership.

You don’t have to limit yourself to a single type of partnership or affiliate program. With PartnerStack, you can sell directly through distributor networks with the PartnerStack API.

Would you like to explore customer loyalty programs? You can embed customer loyalty programs directly into your product.

Launch new deals, partner promotions, special offers for affiliates or partners. Then, track partner links, leads, and deals inside PartnerStack.

Set Your Sweet Rewards

No one business is the same, but all businesses need a way to generate leads and sales.

Depending on how your business works, your products, and your services, set up custom reward programs for your partners.

In turn, your partners will put in the effort to drive traffic, leads, or sales for you using their own, individualized custom links.

But the best part about PartnerStack is that you can set your own reward system which can automate and target the goals you seek with your partner program.

Launch Smart Campaigns & Automate

Need an NDA signed by each partner as they sign up with your program? You can automate that. Want to engage with your partners with email campaigns?

You’ll have access to campaign management designed for partner success.

You can also boost your leads or sales with timed campaigns, launch time-sensitive sub-programs, and set dedicated time periods for bonus commissions, for instance.

Of course, your PartnerStack dashboard allows you to track your partners, and each individual partners’ performance.

As a business or a brand, you’ll always know where your sales are coming from, who’s generating referrals or sales, and how to improve each partner’s performance (if you prefer to be hands-on like that).

Highly Successful Case Studies Of Affiliate Programs By Brands

Inspiration is OP. PartnerStack boasts of some of the best brands you already know (and love).

SaaS Brands (among others) report driving anywhere from 20-50% of their annual revenue through referrals and partnerships alone, thanks to the exemplary work that self-driven affiliates and partners do.

For startups and SaaS businesses, driving annual revenue or monthly revenue through an army of well-chosen partners is the single best thing you can do to grow your business with minimal risk (and all the exposure + rewards)

That’s exactly what PartnerStack enables. As to some successful case studies of affiliate programs, here are some of them:

Unbounce

Unbounce is a popular (& old-timer) when it comes to building scalable no-code landing pages. Built for small business owners and marketers, it’s a true drag-and-drop builder (now with several new features such as Conversion Intelligence™, automated A/B testing, and more).

Read:

Unbounce Review: The Only Landing Page Builder You’ll Ever Need

Thanks to the Unbounce Affiliate Program on PartnerStack, Unbounce converts 50% of free trials to paying customers. The challenge was to find more people to try out the software.

PartnerStack’s PRM system helps Unbounce launch, manage partners, manage (+ add) popular resources like the much-loved Conversion Benchmark Report and split subscription revenue while paying partners automatically. More than 5000+ partners now contribute to Unbounce’s growth with NTS (New Trial Starts).

More than 25% of New Trial Starts for Unbounce — the most important KPI for measuring marketing and acquisition for SaaS Products — now come from referral partners.

Leadpages

Bob Sparkins — manager, affiliates and education at Leadpages — sums it up eloquently:

“PartnerStack has enabled us to build a program that we really wanted to be of benefit to us as a business and to our partners who were driving traffic.”

Leadpages — while growing rapidly — had little to no visibility into who was referring them new business or have access to a breakdown of how much revenue was attributed to referrals.

The CRM system they were using at the time restricted their ability to segment partners (tiers, according to performance, for instance).

It was hard to maintain relationships with high-performing partners, encourage new partners, or to support partners.

PartnerStack comes to the rescue — with complete visibility into what matters most for Leadpages: visibility w.r.t partners referring new business, a breakdown of commissions payable, workflows, ability to tag or segment partners, automate messages, broadcast new resources, and so much more.

As a result, Leadpages achieved an impressive 19% ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) through partnerships alone.

Gorgias

For Gorgias — an eCommerce customer service and customer support software — More than 50% of all company revenue comes from partnerships.

Moosend

Moosend was struggling to retain its partners, month on month (call it the kind of bleeding you don’t want).

It was getting a tad too much to manage a manual workflow of creating partner links, affiliate links, and a manual process for partner payouts. Engaging, encouraging, supporting, and helping out new partners? Forget about it.

PartnerStack helped Moosend take advantage of PartnerStack’s PRM and that proved to be a game changer for Moosend.

Moosend managed to generate 10/6% of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) from partnerships alone by using resources, automated payouts, personalized communication to segmented partners, and utilizing partner challenges, and more.

Bomb Bomb

What’s the best way to congratulate, nudge, push, encourage, and make affiliate partners thrive?

Send them a customized email with a video in it.

Bomb Bomb is an aysnc video messaging platform, and sending emails with videos is what it does best.

Todd Burleson, partnerships manager at Bomb Bomb, needed a way to customize emails the brand would send to affiliates and partners for the hard work they do. Call it a move towards better partner experience.

Here’s an example of a video where Todd explains how affiliates and partners can use Bomb Bomb’s resources.

Bomb Bomb, thanks to its partner program with PartnerStack, boasts of an affiliate-driven 41% increase in net-new partner revenue in 2022.

In conclusion, PartnerStack does what almost no other affiliate marketing management platforms do: recruitment and application, resource management, referral tracking, and critically, referral payouts.

How do you run a referral program or a partner program for your business?